Over the weekend Lady Warsi has joined Jeremy Hunt in the dock at the permanent tribunal of inquiry which Fleet St runs to keep public figures (especially those unlikely to sue them) on their toes. Its activities greatly outshine those of Sir Brian Leveson, though their procedures are not always so fastidious.

The fate of the culture secretary still hangs in the balance. Clearly he has shown poor judgment, at the very least, as last week's email revelations underline. But his survival depends on his own performance before Lord Justice Leveson and on how much David Cameron values him, both as a trusted colleague and as a shield. Current attacks on George Osborne make the latter calculation ever-more important.

But what of Sayeeda Warsi, an altogether less significant figure? From what I have read in yesterday's Sunday Times [paywall] and elsewhere I cannot feel too outraged about the overnight allowance money she claimed – around £12,000, we read – in the capital over the six months which followed her appointment as a life peer in mid-2007.

It's complicated – as it usually is – and there's a subplot whereby she apparently failed to register the rent from a flat she bought in north-west London around that time and rented out after her circumstances changed in 2011. Since Warsi declared it to the Cabinet Office and – more importantly – to the tax man, her failure to put it in the Lords register strikes me as the kind of "oversight" any of us might make in busy lives. Yes?

But the nights she stayed in a house in Acton, west London – and charged the Lords for overnight expenses – are more problematic. The system of allowances – you can read it here – has changed a great deal since the MPs expenses row of 2008 engulfed the Lords and led to the suspension, or even jailing, of several MPs and peers.

Just reading a little about how it works underlines how complicated it is. To make matters yet more complicated, Warsi – the co-chair of the Tory party as I type – was using a bedroom loaned by Naweed Khan, a friend (an employee of Tory HQ, he later became her special adviser) who was in turn living there himself rent-free.

Lady Warsi and Khan both say she made appropriate contributions on the nights she stayed there rather than at a hotel – charging the taxpayer the then rate of £165.50 a night when she was in London on Lords business. The trouble is that the Acton house is actually owned by Dr Wafik Moustafa, who says the Tory chairman was his guest, restaurants meals included; indeed that she felt sufficiently at home there to criticise him for keeping whisky in the house and eating non-halal meat.

She even threatened to smash his liquor bottles, so the generous GP now says. But he too is an active Tory of 30 years standing, an Egyptian whose Conservative Arab League has not been recognised by party HQ despite his efforts on their behalf. Hark, I think I hear the sound of grinding axes. Dr Moustafa has since fallen out with Lady Warsi. Neither she nor Khan paid me, he says.

Is this getting us far? I'm not sure it is. Families and friends have such difficulties over money or politics. I barely know Warsi but would make a couple of gentle points in her defence. One is that peers are not paid and that their allowances, however you dress up the words, are designed to cushion that fact.

I'm sure some peers sign on each day without pulling their weight, in order to claim useful sums of cash, plenty of others work very hard, though are often quite elderly. Some even claim nothing. The same problem bedevilled the MPs expenses row. Plenty of honest MPs of all parties have told me that they were taught to regard the money as an allowance ("you're not claiming enough", officials told them) rather than an out-of-pocket expense.

Anyone who knows this political world will recognise the importance of the distinction. One of the disservices the Daily Telegraph did the country in its very thorough exposé of the MPs' arrangement was to fail to explain that point.

It's also noticeable that those MPs and peers who got into trouble tended either to be Labour ones of modest background or of different ethnic origin, precisely the kind of outsiders least equipped to navigate these tricky waters and hardest to prosecute. More worldly Tories, Cameron and Osborne spring to mind, simply maxed up their allowances on second home mortgages, clean and simple, and (apart from a bit of wisteria trimming) emerged unscathed.

So I imagine Warsi, then a 36-year-old Dewsbury solicitor and a failed wannabe parliamentary candidate, the unprivileged daughter of working-class Pakistani immigrants (who moved from factory work to successful furniture manufacture), was both flattered and bewildered when Cameron spotted her potential as a symbol of his detoxed Tory party: an articulate Muslim woman of modest parentage. Perfect !!

But there are always risks on plucking people from obscurity and putting them under the spotlight without an apprenticeship. Her life thoroughly disrupted (she was obtaining a divorce from her arranged teenage marriage about this time), Warsi came to London and probably did what others advised her to do. By Christmas that year she and Labour's Lord Ahmed were dashing to the Sudan to rescue a British teacher from the teddy-bear-blasphemy affair, so foolish a row that I will not revive it here.

I can see quite easily why she might have got things wrong, not least in treating expenses as allowances at a time when she must have been losing income and acquiring extra costs in a wholly new and scary world. It was common enough at the time when MPs and peers could see the vast salaries and bonuses being paid to some of their committee witnesses from the pre-bust City. Some of them felt a bit hard done-by.

You don't need to sympathise, but you might understand. Other times, other morals, as the old saying goes in French.

So why is it out now? That's more interesting. The Sunday Times has long run a sideline on politicians expenses and done some good work, though I have always felt its talents would have been even better deployed on News International's and its parent body's complex tax affairs. But the knives are also out for Warsi for being what some Tory MPs and activists see as a liability rather than an asset as Tory chair.

In today's Mail, Andrew Pierce handily sums up the complaints of the grassroots with his usual expedient efficiency. The Sunday Telegraph seems to have switched its splash story to pick up the Sunday Times's investigation – not something a Sunday paper likes doing. There may be a whiff here of prejudice, though it's always tricky.

A few weeks ago the Sunday Tel splashed on claims that Archbishop John Sentamu, then favourite to move from York to Canterbury when Dr Rowan Williams steps down, was the victim of racist mutterings. Is it more offensive to entertain racist mutterings against a candidate or to mutter claims that others are muttering (if you see what I mean)?

The fact is that, just as Dr Sentamu is seen by some as too impulsive and emotional to head the Anglican communion in these dangerous times, so Warsi is seen as too lightweight to be unleashed on Radio 4's Today programme and TV spots where the chairman is expected to perform. In both cases the hostility is reinforced by what we might call cultural conservatism on core issues such as gay rights/gay marriage. Warsi also stuck her neck out – even redtop man, Kelvin McKenzie was impressed – when she said, rightly I think, that the Lancashire grooming cases spring from the attitudes of some Pakistani men.

That should all have pleased culturally conservative British Tory activists who are reported to be pretty cross over the gay marriage issue. But life is such that they are more likely to remember Lady Warsi's threat to Dr ("I'm an Egyptian Muslim, we are not so strict") Moustafa's scotch bottles and use it to justify a hunch that the party needs a new chairman who is more in touch with their feelings and interests. By that they usually mean Norman Tebbit who flirts perilously close to the Ukip line.

We shall see. But whatever the rights and wrongs of her expenses claims, she's not a good enough chairman for such dangerous times as the coalition now faces. So Lady Warsi should brace herself for a new job when David Cameron finally gets round to the long-predicted, long-postponed reshuffle that is now needed to stop his regime from shipping water. If she manages to last that long.